I was wondering if anybody has participated in a OL/PL club at a college or university. We started one at Utah last year but only had 3 people, including myself, participate. I am the only one remaining now and was wondering if anybody had any ideas on how to recruit people to join.

Last year, we posted flyers where the ESS students attend classes. I was going to post flyers around the entire campus this year. I am just getting frustrated that people are not into it. I see people at the school gym doing one of the big 3 or the OL lifts and ask them if they would like to join the club, but they usually refuse. I had one person attending, but he dropped out after about a week. I don't understand. We have good half-racks, bumper plates, platforms, and benches where the club trains, but nobody wants to be in it.

Also, we have three smart and experienced coaches. The head coach is a doctoral student in exercise physiology and has experience competing in both PL and OL. He has also worked with Mike Gattone in the past. One of the other coaches is on the ESS faculty and competes in WABDL meets. Finally, the last coach is a doctoral student in exercise physiology and used to be an assistant S&C coach at Utah State.

We plan on getting people to come and compete and have even opened up the club to anybody interested in S&C so we can get more people to come out. We also plan to use some of the money that the school is going to give us to have someone prominent in OL or PL come be a guest speaker.

I guess the big question is how would one go about making these sports sound fun. It seems like there is nobody interested. I especially can't believe that we don't have a lot of ESS students come out just to learn technique, since a good amount of them don't know what some of the lifts are and learning to perform them would be helpful for their careers.

I hear ya. I go to a school with 15,000 kids + grad school students and so far there is no interest in either. Does your school ever have some kind of publicity fair for all of the clubs? Mine just had one on campus where people set up their tables with a bunch of information. A good idea would be to get a huge ass TV and play youtube playlists of Olympic lifting with awesome music. Well, that is what I plan to do.

We had a pretty decent one. Mostly powerlifters and bodybuilders along with recreational lifters who were sick of the lame campus gym. We had our own gym in the basement of the rec building.

We tried to send a team of lifters to most local meets, set up group training times, and worked to organize a strength challenge/strongman type event open to all students with the head of the campus recreation department.

Public demonstrations will pique people's interest, but sports like this seem to be the sort of thing that people have to find on their own.